Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Poorly

I was just reading the introduction from Robert Kiyosaki’s excellent book “Before You Quit Your Job” (see left) and one of the headings struck me as being a little odd: “Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Poorly”.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for producing quality work all the time. But sometimes it’s better to have your 2nd or 3rd draft as your product, rather than waiting until the product is perfect. There comes a time when you have to say “it’s good enough“. Don’t worry what your mother taught you, in business near enough is often good enough.

Kiyosaki uses Microsoft as an example for just getting a product to market that isn’t perfect but is good enough to partially satisfy the demand. You then work on improving the product and put out an updated version. Now Microsoft isn’t the best example, in my opinion, because you could argue that it crosses the line between good enough and just plain shoddy (just look at all the bugs in Vista), which you never should do. I think WordPress is a better example. It’s now up to version 2.7.1. Each of its versions have been pretty good, but the next has almost always been a bit better than the previous. Imagine if they didn’t release the product until at least version 3 – the world would certainly be a poorer place.

There are many examples, but all of them lead to this truth:

There comes a time when you have to stop developing and start marketing.

If you wait until your product is perfect, you risk missing your window of opportunity. You risk another company coming in and grabbing the market share you easily could have taken. That’s a whole lotta money that will be in your competitor’s pocket rather than yours. You had the brilliant idea, you found an effective way to solve peoples problems, you deserve to profit from that. But you can screw it up by being a perfectionist, just as you can by being sloppy.

Have a look at your websites “under construction” or books you are working on. Is it good enough to go to market? Good enough to go live? Is it time to stop researching and start writing? Time to stop learning and start doing? So what are you waiting for? Get cracking.

Post navigation

2 thoughts on “Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Poorly”

Ahhh – WordPress. You know, a couple years back I was studying about media delivery and people were watching some of the collages I was making using some pretty high end software from photodex. I had also used microsoft movie maker which is fun but you don't have the keyframe controls and such for a professional presentation. They loved them? Everyone and their brother told me to sell this service online. So, off I was again after a protracted break from my html days into the world of php, Content management and flash. As I toiled, picnik, mugshots and a slew of others with deeper pocket were launching free apps with drag and drop capability for anyone to open a free account and make their own. This is about perception. Our local professional wedding photographers looked at the work and conceded the custom jobs were far superior and would probably add 250 – 400 bucks to an already 2000 dollar bill for a standard wedding shoot. The market is too small for this kind of custom work and while I had an excellent online presence and good traffic, everyone and their brother was by then on facebook playing with all the free gadgets. It was a good exercise anyway, because online media delivery is a great tool for me to have in my arsenal of wares for my next foray. This time, it's not about custom slide shows and it's not quite ready. But, it's ready enough . . .

Great point Mike, this is the exact realization I had regarding http://MoochList.com when I finally realized this great idea is worth publication, even though it wasn’t yet the gem I know it will become. I came up with the idea in January and planned to launch the website in April, however, August was already here and MoochList was still non-existent. Realizing my idea of the site simply wasn’t probable for another few months, I knew even in its infancy, it could be useful to so many as is.

8 full months after coming up with the concept, I published the website. It’s functional, and can help those in need right now. But now I can obtain feedback from users about what else should be included. Today, I’m already proud, and I’m confident it will grow to its full potential in helping people from around the world.